Quotes About Science

Men recorded their experiences and called it history; men looked about the world and called their observations science; men wondered about the existence of God and the problem of evil and called their speculations theology; men did handiwork and called it art; men made up stories, wrote them down and called them literature; men thought about such topics as truth, beauty, justice, and the nature of existence and called their opinions philosophy.

Imperialism provided the means through which concepts of what counts as human could be applied systematically as forms of classification, for example through hierarchies of race and typologies of different societies. In conjunction with imperial power and with 'science', these classification systems came to shape relations between imperial powers and indigenous societies.

The genesis of some of this thinking might have been the words of Thomas Jefferson in his influential and widely circulated 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia. Though he was not a doctor or scientist, Jefferson cataloged the physiological ways Black bodies differed from white bodies in this 244-page document.

Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach. I now see scientific accomplishments as a path, not an end; a path leading to and disappearing in mystery.

I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind -- qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.

I can't get used to the ease with which one covers the world today. It's no longer an effort--Pole--equator--oceans--continents--it's just a question of which way you point the nose of your plane. The pure joy of flight as an art has given way to the pure efficiency of flight as a science.... Science is insulating man from life -- separating his mind from his senses. The worst of it is that it soon anaesthetizes his senses so that he doesn't know what he's missing.

The growing knowledge of science does not refute man's intuition of the mystical. Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or in time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.

And don't forget last year's electrodes, stuck to my leg, the centuries of science reviving one blue foot. Years from now I'll be walking around on plastic legs with a battery-powered heart and silicon eyes, eating imported apricots and flash-frozen chicken hormones. I'll think, again: In an Ice Age cave I'd be dead.

Ecological concerns are daily news now (alas). And poets have been writing all along about stars and roses; it's not such a stretch now to bring in the Hubble telescope or dark matter or genetics.

Genes rule the world.

Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of -- heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find t he right solution, the just solution of international problems, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

We were all too young. Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren't fully developed until you're twenty-five years old?

I know many scientific facts about the human heart- not the least of which is that it's far easier to make a heart stop beating entirely than to keep it from loving the wrong person.

The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives.

A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

We pretend that the debate about genetically modified crops is a debate about science when the reality is, actually, that the science is very clear. It is really a debate about values.

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.

As a child, I was fascinated by any branch of physical or biological science. Even today, I find great excitement in discovering the complexity and variability of the world we live in, getting a glimpse into the deeper reality that we mostly ignore in our everyday human activities.

When I started working at NASA and understanding what the capabilities really were of the space station and the space program, one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to do experiments in space. We can do a number of experiments where gravity is actually a variable.

Would people cheat on climate science? Sure. Because all it is a model into which there are 2,000 variables, and if I want this outcome, I nudge that one up a little and down a little bit, and there you go.

That said, ID does not qualify as science because it gives us nothing to test or measure. Science requires replicable tests involving measurable variables.